Record quarter for Helloprint

Rapid and profitable growth, 50 vacancies and the launch of 5 new European countries; Helloprint, the Dutch-founded leading marketplace for customized print products in Europe, is on the rise.

"Over the last two years we have worked tremendously hard within Helloprint to strengthen our foundation in about every field," said Hans Scheffer, Chief Executive Officer of Helloprint. "The covid crisis gave us a huge push, but I believe it is the best thing that has happened to our company in recent years. This allowed us to work even harder and with more focus on the foundation of our marketplace model, our efficiency and our growth strategy – and we are now reaping the benefits."

Helloprint shares its approach for rapid-growth within the marketplace model: The main driver of growth is customer retention. "90% of our revenue is generated by recurring customers," said Scheffer. "That is our explicit focus; We achieve a Net Promoter Score of 60 and a customer satisfaction of 90%. Our focus on quality, reliability and customer satisfaction is clearly reflected here". These numbers allowed Helloprint to rapidly expand across Europe, in just nine years the company has presence in 13 countries. It has developed its own expansion hyper-growth blueprint model that consists of four phases; A Launch and Learn, Kick Off, Accelerate and Mature phase.“ We have a clear replicable blueprint for launching and scaling countries and categories”, says Scheffer.

“In the first phase, we test markets by minimizing localization and local production, and we test market response by solely testing the paid marketing channels. We only focus on conversion and customer journey and we learn rapidly what works. In the next phase, we localize service and offering, but we limit the product range. In this phase we optimize our marketing mix so that it will be less depending on paid marketing. If a market works, we continue to the Acceleration phase, where we ramp up marketing and fully localize offering and local production. Our French and UK markets are great examples of this phase, and after this phase, markets can become in the “Mature” phase where we optimize margin and EBITDA, while still introducing new products and services. By doing this very systematically, we create a growth machine that not only grows fast, but also has a clear focus on sustainable profitability”.

Helloprint's marketplace model plays a clear role in growth. "We are the only European player with a network of this size," says Scheffer. "Our platform has more than 250 manufacturers from 20 countries, which we connect to almost all international and local carriers in Europe. Smart engineering and algorithms determine where something is produced and who ships it, based on availability, cost and sustainability. Our proprietary data structure and technology is the basis for this. The combination of the technology, our data environment and our large network makes it that we have a fair competitive advantage  when it comes down to our supply. We notice that this is even more important in today’s world, where supply chain challenges are a large issue for many parties. Due to our marketplace model, we are able to leverage the strength of our network even more than ever”